Quartet Pulls Out All Stops

In describing his composition "Surrendering to the Stream", premiered by the Mendelssohn String Quartet last Friday night at Paine Hall, David Horne referred to it as "a highly programmatic work in which the four members of the quartet were different' characters.'" These different characters emerged through the medium of each work the group performed.

While the coherency of the Quartet's ensemble and conceptions was uniformly irreproachable, the four performers at the same time made manifest their own quite disparate styles. The first violinist, Nick Eanet, revealed almost immediately the exquisite clarity of his highly-nuanced sound, while the cellist Marcy Rosen imbued all her solos with intense lyricism. The playing of the second violinist, Nicholas Mann, was passionate though somewhat rough, and the phrasing of the violist, Katherine Murdock, evinced bright enthusiasm.

The first work on the program, Beethoven's Quartet, Opus 18, No. 1, was the most impressively rendered of the pieces, Its second movement, a theme and variations set labeled "Adagio affettuoso e appassionato," was wrenchingly beautiful, the notes spun out with the refinement of silk. The piece provided a musical tour of each player's attributes, certain themes given from one to another, each adding his or her own carefully-conceived statement to the entirety of the conversation. The faster movements, while not quite as powerfully alluring, were also effectively interpreted and performed.

David Horne's work "Surrendering to the Stream" was affectingly performed as well. Although the players sometimes seemed to suffer from the stiltedness endemic to contemporary performers' interpretations of recently-written music, their performance was, for the most part, sympathetic to the composition. While some works based on specific poems or material extraneous to the work rely on intellectual interest for their appeal, requiring that the listener decipher the thematic "content" of each phrase, "Surrendering to the Stream" depends for its success primarily on its purely aural beauty. Commencing with a lone low cello note, the piece progresses to reveal two different motifs, one embodied in the romantic solos played by each instrument, the other rousing and dramatic. Although the work seems slightly too long, its musical characterizations are quite memorable and the lyric sections are especially beautiful.

Johannes Brahms' String Quartet in c minor, Opus 51, No. 1, was the final and most substantial piece on the program. Unfortunately, this work sounded the least polished of all that the Quartet performed. In the first movement, "Allegro," where the texture is quite thick, the balance was not effective, the notes of the accompanying voices excessively labored and the melody not sufficiently passionate. Here also the contrasting characters displayed by the different instruments detrimentally affected the Quartet's performance; while in most places these variations added interest, the dryness of the violist's sound in the Brahms grated on the ear. The second movement, "Romanze: Poco Adagio," sounded labored and muddy and the third movement was unmemorable. Only the fourth movement, again "Allegro," displayed the requisite character of intensity and dramatic excitement, rising momentously to its climax.

Though the players' differing styles failed to coalesce in the Brahms, for the most part the Quartet managed to present a unique approach synthesized from the disparate strengths of its members. The voices of each instrumentalist, beautiful and intriguing on their own, when conjoined showed the Mendelssohn String Quartet as one of the best.